Unconditionally and Irrevocably in Love
by EdwardsLily
Summary: Cute, sad, one-sided Bella/Jasper one-shot. I guess fluff, if fluff can be depressing. For Elli, who is the biggest B/J shipper I know. And for everyone else, who loves Jazz even half as much as she does.


**Unconditionally and Irrationally in Love **

**Dedicated with all my heart and soul to ellibobelli, who, were we to swing that way, would definitely be the love of my life. Unfortunately, we are both girls and I have sold my heart to Edward. Do not grieve, love, because that means that you get Jasper all to yourself. This one is for you in so many ways. I hope you like it, even though it is disgustingly OOC and A/U.

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When she was with Edward, which was often, she pasted on her perfect smile and put on the airs that everyone was used to seeing. It had been easier in the beginning, when she'd actually been in love with him. Life had been easy then – there was no pretending for Bella. She didn't have to _act_ happy all the time because she _was _happy all the time. Edward was everything she could have dreamed of: intelligent, witty, polite, mischievous, beautiful, sensitive, caring, gentle, perfect… That was before she cried herself to sleep every night with someone else on her mind.

She'd met him at a party that Edward and his brother Emmett hosted for the other members of the football team. He'd come with a date, which was a bad sign from the start. Bella knew his sister, Rosalie, because she was Emmett's longtime, steady, bombshell girlfriend. Bella and Rosalie had gotten to know each other well in all the time they spent together, even though they were social opposites in the cliquey hell that was Forks High School. Rosalie had mentioned a few times that she hated her brother's girlfriend, which seemed like a good sign to Bella.

Jasper Hale was the most beautiful person that Bella had ever seen. Even from across the dark, crowded room, even under the pheromone-heavy, sweaty grime that hung in the air of the living-room-turned-dance-club, she saw that he was not everything she could have dreamed of, he was _more_. She wanted to run her fingers through his luscious blonde hair – her fingers itched to touch it, imagining the silky smooth texture of the curls that she could _feel_ springing under her hands. She wanted to take the ridiculously flattering, understated blue tee shirt off his ridiculously perfect musculature and run her hands over his beautifully sculpted chest, his perfect proportions, the bulging muscles in his arms. Where Edward was strong and wiry, and Emmett was burly, Jasper was long, lean, lanky, better balanced than either of his friends. She wanted to study his smiling pink lips, to learn their contours and explore the balance of the pouting lower one in contrast to the smooth, curving upper one. She didn't just want to taste them, she wanted to draw them, memorize them. She wanted to cup her hand around his strong jaw and brush her fingers over his high cheekbones.

Bella wasn't an impulsive person, so the burning need that washed through her frightened her. She wanted nothing more than to rush to his side, to flirt, to preen, to become like the girls she so loathed when they fawned over her Edward. Edward! What if he saw…? But it didn't matter. Bella just wanted to _meet_ him, and Edward was surely busy with someone else.

But then Bella's heart burst, sank, deflated like a dying balloon when she saw the girl perched on a kitchen barstool next to Jasper, leaning against his arm and laughing gaily. Alice Brandon. She was the nicest girl in Bella's Gym class – the only one who could stand being partners with her, because her own grace made up for Bella's woefully lacking coordination. Bella found Alice enchanting, easy to talk to, surprisingly sympathetic for someone who had such a reputation of making her rounds among FHS's eligible single heartthrobs. And now she was with Jasper.

Bella had to leave the party to hide in the bathroom, hit by crippling waves of irrational pain. There was no reason that she should feel so strongly about someone she hadn't even met. By most people's standards, she was an unusually rational person. She never fell in love with people who were dating some of the few people at school who saw her for something more than Edward Cullen's brainy new trophy girl. She didn't fall in love with people before she'd been able to judge their characters, and she certainly didn't fall in love with _other_ people when she was perfectly happy with Edward, thank you very much. Much to her embarrassment, she spent half an hour in the lady's room, crying her eyes out over a boy she'd never met.

Life went downhill for Bella after that. She did her best to avoid Jasper at all costs, but it wasn't easy. Not when he started hanging out more with her boyfriend and her best friend. Not when she and Alice grew unintentionally closer and started doing things together (much to Rosalie's chagrin). Every time she had to be in the same room as him, she felt like he'd stabbed a knife straight into her heart, and she could barely make it through the rest of the day. And then she would look at Edward, and the knife would twist ruthlessly, scraping its rusty, serrated edges against the walls of her ventricles, and she would collapse into a blubbering mess who really had to go home, sorry about that. She had a previous engagement she'd forgotten about; she left her purse at home; her mom had called, and it was urgent; anything to get her away from the pain of looking at Jasper and Alice happy together and the guilt of seeing Edward, still the perfect gentleman at her side, oblivious to the fact that she was actually pining over one of his best friends.

Bella and Edward were the "it" couple at FHS. She was number one in the class, an insufferable brain with a face and body so pure and innocent, fresh and beautiful that one only had to meet her to want to know her better – either casually or much less innocently. Much to her mortification, nearly the whole of the male half of her grade had fallen at her feet when she'd stepped into her first class after she transferred to Forks in her junior year. Edward was the captain of the football team, but he was also a ridiculously decorated "good example for the children of our community," or some shit like that. He was the poster boy of perfection, and when he'd asked Bella to the junior prom it seemed to the whole class like there could be no prettier, better matched pair in the world. So everyone expected them to be happy together – not to complain about being _stuck together by social obligations_. Especially not when Bella knew that there were dozens of girls who would have given almost anything to be in her place.

Surely, she was the most faithless, undeserving, horrible girlfriend, friend – person! – in the world. Every day that she spent sandwiched between the two boys was her personal version of hell. Every time she tried to look little Alice Brandon in the eye she wondered if killing herself might not just make life easier for everyone. Surely, the world would be overpopulated by one fewer miserable wretch.

But then, she would look at Jasper and her heart would do that exhilarating, unfamiliar flippy thing that it had never done with Edward. Heat would rush her face; she would giggle like a schoolgirl and she couldn't help but to wonder how she would ever live with herself if she threw even the slightest hint of a chance away. Sometimes, she was content just to be in his company and pretend, if only for a moment, that she deserved to be there.

And sometimes, he would look back at her with a beautiful, heartbreaking sparkle in his eye that made her go weak at the knees; he would bump her knee under the table accidentally with his own; he would smile at her in a way that made her sure that she could fly. She wondered idly if she didn't imagine it, the Jasper might actually like her. Even if he just liked her as a person, that would be okay.

And then on the days when Alice was being especially absurd, Jasper would look over at Bella with a mutual, shared sort of exasperation that made her warm from head to toe, and she couldn't help but to think that maybe he felt something too. A connection. A mutual bond, even if it was only Alice, or Emmett, or Edward that they shared. Sometimes, she thought he might be smiling at her in a way that indicated there was something a little more.

And she knew that those moments would make the rest of the torture a little more bearable, because Jasper knew who she was, knew that she was there. Jasper acknowledged her and greeted her and always had a smile for her that was a little slice of heaven. And she knew that she wouldn't throw that away for the world, even if it meant so much more to her than it did to him. She wouldn't stop hoping that someday, someday, something _really_ more could happen. And she knew that, even with that tiny sliver of hope, life was still definitely worth living.


End file.
